Deeyoon: A Site Where You Can Debate Anyone About Anything — On Live Video

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The Internet is a great place for arguments, and a new startup called Deeyoon aims to bring arguments to video.

Of course, there are a bunch of other startups working on video chat. However, none of them seems to have become a huge, sustainable hit yet, and Deeyoon CEO Joe Kalfa says he’s taking a different approach — not just general, unstructured conversations, but “live, real-time video debates.” (Airtime recently moved closer to this model with the launch of topic chatrooms.)

So when you visit the Deeyoon website, you can watch live video of any debates that are happening at the moment, and browse archived versions of older ones. You can start a debate of your own that other users can join, or join a debate that someone else suggested. You choose the length of the debate, but Deeyoon then actually structures the discussion (opening statements, rebuttals, etc.) so that it’s not just two people shouting at each other.

Here’s a particularly impressive example of a Deeyoon conversation: Jose Canseco (yes, that Jose Canseco, the legendary baseball player) actually jumped on Deeyoon to debate someone who argued that he doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame due to his steroid use. Watching Canseco address these criticisms directly is super-fascinating, even for a non-baseball fan like me.

Kalfa doesn’t want to limit the debate to the company’s site — his team has also created a publishing widget, allowing other sites to point their readers to Deeyoon, where they can start a debate related to whatever they are reading about.

Deeyoon is being funded by Kalfa for now. He says he made his money in the medical and dental supply business, although he’s getting more involved in the tech world, with investments in Wahooly, Caplinked, and TweetTV.